An ontological approach to oracle BPM

Abstract

A modern business process management (BPM) operates using common tenants of an underlying Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) runtime infrastructure based on the Service Component Architecture (SCA) and supports the BPMN 2.0 OMG 1 standard. Semantically-enabling all BPM artifacts, from high-level design to deployment and the runtime model of a BPM application, promotes continuous process refinement, comprehensive impact analysis, and reuse to minimize process and service proliferation. A semantic database can manage semantically-enabled BPM ontologies and models, enable machine-driven inference to discover implicit relationships in the models, and perform pattern-matching queries to find associations. This paper presents an ontology for BPM based upon BPMN 2.0, Service Component Architecture (SCA) and the Web Ontology Language (OWL 2) that can support a wide range of use cases for process analysis, governance, business intelligence and systems management. It has the potential to bring together stakeholders across an enterprise, for a truly agile, end-to-end enterprise architecture. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.